Indian Killer

The police interview the housewife who was at the slot machine next to David. The police reveal that they found his pickup in the parking lot but that he seems to have disappeared. When she asks if the disappearance has anything to do with the white man who was murdered and scalped, the police say they do not know.

When she hears about the disappearance at the casino, Olivia calls Daniel. He dismisses it as sounding like a normal robbery, and she thinks about the boy’s family worrying, remembering all the times she has worried about her own son when he has disappeared. She suggests that they see if John is at his apartment, and Daniel agrees, although is reluctant to admit how much he wants to search for him. On the way, Daniel swears at other drivers while Olivia listens to Glenn Gould, thinking about how the classical musician’s mental health did not stop him producing remarkable music and wondering if John will “ever be able to create anything of value” (113).

Daniel recalls how his son became increasingly withdrawn as he grew older, remembering him shutting himself in his room night after night playing tapes of pow-wows at great volume. One of many times when Daniel was being kept awake, he hammered on John’s door, but John simply increased the volume until “it sounded like a whole tribe was beating drums” (115). When John moved out, Daniel hoped the move would help stabilize his son, but he soon found himself banging on John’s apartment door instead of his bedroom door and John still refusing to answer. Olivia and Daniel drive back from this unsuccessful visit without talking. After a while, Daniel turns off Olivia’s music and switches on Truck Schultz’s radio show.

On air, Truck Schultz complains that the Washington State Indian Tribes for Aboriginal Gambling wish to increase the number of casinos in the state. He suggests that this is unconstitutional and an effort to subvert American morality, even suggesting the Indians have “declared a cultural war on us” (119). He claims to acknowledge past wrongs committed against Indians but suggests that, despite offers of friendship, Indians still “insist on their separation from normal society” (118). He argues that they are bitter and arrogant and bringing only corruption and vice. As an example, he reports receiving a call from Aaron about David’s disappearance, presenting David as a great all-American student and heavily implying that Indians are responsible for his disappearance.

Aaron and Buck Rogers go searching for David on the Tulalip Indian Reservation and are startled by a “world suddenly filled with Indians” (122). Buck comments that any of them could have taken David, and Aaron is prepared for anything, knowing his father has a pistol under his jacket. Their search is unsuccessful, and on the drive home, Buck bloodies Aaron’s nose for failing to look after his younger brother.

Aaron loses all interest in college, dedicating himself to searching for David. He prints off posters and puts them up all over Washington. Although he desperately wants to cry, recognizing that the search is likely hopeless, he cannot make himself do so. He also refuses his housemate’s clumsy efforts to console him. Unable to mourn or express himself, he instead nurses a growing rage and hatred, sitting alone in his room with a baseball bat listening to Truck Schultz and plotting “revenge against the unknown” (124).

John sees a vivid image of Father Duncan kneeling in the desert and wonders if priests pray for themselves as well as their congregation. He imagines the priest “wanting to be heard by every version of God, pray[ing] in English, Latin, and Spokane” (125). There are storm clouds in his vision, and in order to outrun them, John hitchhikes to the Hupa Indian Reservation in California. He often travels to reservations to try and find his mother or a sense of connection. However, on this occasion he is searching for Bigfoot, having become obsessed after watching a documentary in which a group of Bigfoot were said to have fought a group of miners. John did not believe that the miners actually fought them, because he knows that white men always lie and break their promises. An old woman takes him searching for Bigfoot, but they see nothing.

John hitchhikes home and is at work on time on Monday morning. However, he cannot understand the foreman, who seems to be talking an incomprehensible language. The man can also change his face, and John knows that “if he were a good Indian, he would have known the foreman was a shape changer, a loup-garou, a werewolf” (131). He cannot relate to his fellow workers and their constant efforts to prove their masculinity through their behavior and misogynistic bragging. He is also afraid of them, believing that they are conspiring against him. He decides he must leave his job and walks off site. The foreman watches him go, annoyed that he has not clocked out but also relieved as John has been acting increasingly erratically and he was growing afraid that the younger man might throw himself from the building. John walks the streets, confused and unsure where he is going. He looks at the Hammering Man sculpture outside the Seattle Art Museum and considers, “The hammer was all that mattered. The tool and the use of the tool” (134).

Clarence Mather sits at a desk in the basement of the Anthropology Building, thinking about how both Marie and Reggie, through their aggressive defiance of him, failed to act in a manner befitting a “true Spokane.” He believes that he could teach them how to act in a more Indian fashion. He recalls how he and Reggie were friends. Wanting the respect of white men, Reggie went with Mather to men’s retreats, often playing a shamanic role for the invariably white men who attended. He also allowed Mather to access Seattle’s urban Indian culture, and they would often go to Indian bars and sleep with Indian women.

When Mather found a box of tapes of Indian elders reading traditional stories, he was excited to show Reggie. However, Reggie told him that he should destroy the tapes because the stories were never meant to be owned or used by white men in that manner. Part of his motivation was the knowledge that “they’d never be his stories” (137), so he certainly did not want a white man to have them. Mather was deeply disappointed because he had hoped to publish an article on the find. He later denied that the tapes ever existed, determined to preserve them because he had “come to see those stories as his possessions, as his stories, as if it had been his voice on those tapes” (138). The two men argued about the issue and, after Mather said that Reggie was not acting in an appropriately Spokane manner, Reggie punched him and was expelled from the university.

Mather is listening to the tapes in the basement when the power cuts out and he is plunged into darkness. He waits for the lights to come back on, growing increasingly unsettled. He hears rattling and thinks of the bones of prominent Indians that are stored in the basement, growing convinced that someone or something is down there with him. Something touches his face, and he gets up and runs, falling over boxes in the dark. When the lights come back on, he briefly sees an overhang in front of him before he knocks himself out on it. The janitor comes around the corner to find him lying on the floor.

John sits beneath a viaduct under which many homeless Indians shelter. He has visited here before and vaguely knows some of the Indians. Having previously believed that all homeless Indians were alcoholics, he has since learned that many do not drink at all. He sits near a group who are joking and singing and wonders at their ability to do so despite their ragged condition, their hard lives, and their alienation from their tribes, reservations, and families.

Marie arrives under the viaduct in a delivery van and hands out sandwiches to the homeless people, greeting them by name and enquiring after their health. John is embarrassed that he has no gift for Marie and considers running away but instead goes up and greets her. She concludes that he is homeless and decides that this explains his strange behavior when they met at the powwow. She offers John a sandwich, and he wonders if it is poisoned. He opens his mouth to speak, wanting to tell her about Father Duncan, but cannot do so and simply turns and runs until he can no longer recognize his surroundings.   

Marie continues handing out sandwiches, talking with the homeless people and touching them kindly. She knows that she is providing a service for them but also knows that she benefits from it, suspecting that she would break if she ever became so jaded that she ignored the homeless and suffering people around her. She believes that “homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly” and that they form a sort of powerless, marginalized Indian tribe in their own right (146). Homeless Indians are therefore members of two tribes and the most maligned people of all. Marie things of how she despises powerful white men and wonders if she only works as hard as she does at college and elsewhere because she is trying to get revenge.

The killer walks through a park, thinking about the owl and its symbolic association with death. They consider how owls hunt only to live, without emotion, without guilt. The killer wants to hunt like this but feels a need to kill again, the first kill and the first bloody scalp not enough to slake their thirst. The killer watches white children playing in the park, overseen by nannies, mostly Black and Latina, and think of the brown-skinned children left behind so their mothers could help raise white children.

The killer watches Mark Jones, a six-year-old white boy with blue eyes, thinking of the terrible, powerful white man he might become and considering killing him to prevent this, “killing the dragon before it could breathe flames” (151). When Mark and his white nanny leave, the killer follows them home and climbs a tree to watch life inside the house. Mark’s mother returns, and the nanny leaves. She prepares dinner, puts Mark to bed, and watches television before crawling into bed naked. The killer breaks into the house, goes into her room, and watches her before kneeling to pray. The killer then goes to Mark’s room and licks his face gently, causing the boy to wake slightly and see the killer’s face, which “shimmered and changed like a pond after a rock had been tossed into it” (153). The killer lifts him from his bed and leaves behind two owl feathers.